Movie Reaction: Hostiles

Formula: The Searchers / (Dancing with Wolves + Unforgiven)

I think I get the appeal of westerns. It's not really the cowboys and Indians that keep people coming back to the genre. It's the open and unexplored country; the seemingly endless frontier. A man can get on a horse, go to a new town, and become a new man. It's the beginning of civilization out there. When I think about it, the appeal of the Western hasn't really gone away. It's just moved to another genre: the zombie apocalypse movie. Think about it. Both genres are about trying to survive a harsh and unforgiving world without the comfort of civilization. In Westerns, they are navigating the perils of gangs of bandits or Native Americans. In Zombie movies, it's, well, zombies that are after them. The overall appeal is the same. These films are about testing your mettle and the triumph of the human spirit (or the collapse of it). Too bad that realization wasn't enough to get me to like Hostiles.

Hostiles takes places in the 1890s. Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) is a particularly ruthless Army captain, known for his ability to track down Indians. As his last job before retirement, he's tasked with transporting an equally notorious and now freed Indian chief and his family from New Mexico to his homeland in Montana. This chief is responsible for killing several of Blocker's friends over the years. Needless to say, Blocker is not excited about this job. He accepts it because it's the only way he'll earn his pension. During this long journey, Blocker and company find a woman (Rosamund Pike) who's family was recently killed by an even more ruthless Indian tribe. The woman, Rosalie Quaid is in shock. Blocker convinces her to join their convoy until he can get her to safety. The film is episodic. The through line is this journey to Montana. There are many smaller stories though like fighting the Indians who killed Rosalie's family, transporting a murderer played by Ben Foster, and a late run in with some Montana homesteaders. That structure works for the film.

Despite a really spectacular cast, the performances are what I had the most trouble with. Really, it's a great cast. Jesse Plemons and Timothee Chalamet are soldiers under Blocker's command. Wes Studi and Adam Beach are the Indian chief and his son. Bill Camp and Scott Wilson have blink-and-you'll-miss-them roles. There's a number of other actors I'm less familiar with like Rory Cochrane, Jonathan Majors, and Ryan Bingham with significant roles. All this in addition to Oscar winner Christian Bale, Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike, and consistent Oscar snub Ben Foster. By and large, no one is used all that well. It's dispiriting to see Chalamet with such an insignificant role after seeing what he did in Call Me By YourName. Bale gets some good stiff upper lip moments and not much else. Plemons plays his his first remorseful killer in his career, which is nice to see after years of playing cold-blooded monsters like neo-Nazi Todd in Break Bad and Landry "Lance" Clarke in Friday Night Lights. Ben Foster is picked right out of a half dozen other movies I've seen him in (3:10 to Yuma and Hell or High Water come immediately to mind). The person who comes off looking the worst though is Rosamund Pike. She is a terrific actress, however she's asked to do things throughout this film that I'm not sure anyone could pull off. The film begins with the slaughter of her family. It's too early for us to have any attachment to the characters and it's almost comical how only she is able to survive the attack. I'm thinking of one perfectly placed gunshot that has "convenience" written all over it. She then has to be hysterical for the next 30 minutes and plays it BIG. Maybe with an actress who I didn't associate so much with strength and steely resolve, it would've come off as more authentic. As it is, it felt like director Scott Cooper just went with her most exaggerated take for each of those scenes. She eventually levels out and is much better, although I'm not sure I buy the character transformation.

This film hasn't made me that excited to catch up on Scott Coopers other films (Crazy/Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass). Hostiles is more of an amalgam of other westerns than something all its own. Too often is tells rather than shows (Bale has several conversations with characters who are relative strangers to the audience about all the years they've worked together as if I'm supposed to care. I'd rather they let the audience figure out the history from the performances). It captures a decent amount of the beauty of the Western frontier, although a lot of the sets looked like sets on a movie. They didn't feel lived in, although I'll accept that some of that is a choice made to reflect the impermanence of life in the West. The end of the film forces Bale into a decision that doesn't even make any sense: whether he should be on his own or be with Rosamund Pike. There's only one choice that makes any sense. Beyond some of the genre thrills, there wasn't enough in Hostiles for me to enjoy and the thematic elements never hit hard enough to make an impact.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend